JANUARY 24, 2000:
Movie theaters "offer a trip to hell for a nickel," warned a now-forgotten
guardian of morality almost a century ago. That threat wouldn't have fazed
Huckleberry Finn. In the early pages of Mark Twain's comic novel, a teacher
tells our hero that he's on his way to Hades and Huck blandly responds that he
doesn't much mind: at least it would be a change from his dull home town.

Racy movies and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, along with early jazz
and Édouard Manet's painting Olympia, are examined in Culture
Shock, a four-part documentary series airing over the next two Wednesdays
on PBS. Each segment deals with a once-controversial form or piece of art, and
it's no surprise that the series consistently comes down on the side of free
speech. The token voices pleading for restraint -- a mother objecting to kids'
having to read the word "nigger" even in the anti-racist Huckleberry
Finn, a spokesman for Morality in Media pointing out that some damn fine
movies were made in the days of the Production Code -- seem more pitiful than
dangerous.

Culture Shock implicitly makes the point that resistance to
the new is futile and that you should keep any objections to yourself if you
don't want to make a cameo appearance as a jackass in a documentary about rap
music 80 years from now. (William Bennett, ahead of his time, already has a
touch of the jackass in his Culture Shock appearance.) But the
references to the culture wars of the 1990s are fleeting, and the series is not
likely to change anyone's mind on any current controversy. The "Hollywood
Censored" episode, for example, includes several montages showing how cinematic
sex and violence have evolved over the years. If you agree with Mr. Morality in
Media, you'll be appalled by the escalation from Mae West's double entendres to
Glenn Close's shedding her panties for a quickie in Fatal Attraction.
Otherwise, you may see the two scenes as merely different expressions of the
same idea.

That said, Culture Shock is fairly interesting as a history lesson. The
segments, which come from different producers, have some striking elements in
common. In each case, the opponents of innovative art claim to be acting "for
the children." Best example: a maternity hospital that fights the opening of a
music club next door because "jazz emotions would be implanted in the babies."
At least in the three episodes set in America, the offending work of art
ignites a fear of "foreign" races and ethnic groups. Both jazz and early '30s
films were thought to encourage "race mixing," and the Production Code
eventually adopted by Hollywood forbade racial slurs but also any hint of
interracial romance. (As Culture Shock makes clear, we can thank the
Roman Catholic Church for enforcement of the Code, and some Catholic leaders
still seem pissed off that they somehow lost the power to inflict movies like
Going My Way upon American audiences.)

Another common theme is that the upholders of decency always seem to suspect
that they're the victims of some huge practical joke. They simply couldn't
believe that a novel written in the vernacular (such as Huckleberry
Finn) or a record of "jungle music" was being taken seriously by the
intelligentsia. This point is clearest in "The Shock of the Nude: Manet's
Olympia" -- the strongest of the four segments, at least for me, because
it featured the least familiar topic. (It also has the weirdest choice for a
narrator: 3rd Rock from the Sun's John Lithgow, who keeps saying "nyude"
as if telling a smutty joke. Only John Cleese could have been more
disconcerting.) The problem with Manet's painting was not that it depicted a
nude woman but that it depicted a "brazen nude" -- a plain-looking prostitute,
at that -- who looks straight out at the viewer. Museum patrons accustomed to
more idealized depictions of the human form couldn't figure out whether
Olympia was supposed to be a parody or perhaps some kind of challenge to
middle-class sensibilities. Confusion was an effective fuel for outrage.

"The Shock of the Nude" also contains one of the series's best quotes. "It's
hard to revive the shock," an art historian says with some regret. "There's a
great loss to accepting something as a masterpiece. It rests in masterpiece
heaven, with all the other dead things." Indeed, I can imagine living in
another era and buying into all the racist and sexist attitudes that appall me
today, but I find it impossible to imagine turning off a Billie Holiday record.
Just about all of us like to think that we would have responded to the campaign
against the "Devil's music" by signing up for a trip to Hell.